Eyes of Laura Mars

John Carpenter's intriguing original script, about a woman telepathically keyed-in to the sight of a murderer, underwent a cautionary transformation before its final emergence on screen as a glossily gimmicky murder mystery, featuring Dunaway as a female Helmut Newton. Carpenter baled out after nine months' work for producer Jon Peters, trying to soften his conception into a possible Streisand vehicle; and co-credited David Zelag Goodman was but the last of eight or nine scriptwriters subsequently employed to turn it into a shallow, chic confusion of eyes, camera lenses, and saleable images of violence of the sort it now purports to question as an 'issue'. Almost incidentally, it no longer works as a thriller, with a final revelation that one would have thought Psycho rendered impossible to re-use.